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The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

March - 2009 - issue > Technology

Enterprise wide Social Networking Business Intelligence

Puneet Gupta and Hutch Carpenter
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Puneet Gupta and Hutch Carpenter
Enterprise 2.0 continues to expand across businesses and enterprises. In a February 2009 article, consulting firm McKinsey writes that social software “could have a more far-reaching organizational impact than technologies adopted in the 1990s.”1 Market research firm Forrester projects an annual growth in Enterprise 2.0 expenditures of 43%. Clearly, the future of collaboration and information belongs to these new tools and we are seeing the beginnings of a new era of how information will be created, consumed, and discovered inside organizations and the social network effects that both guide and form as a consequence of this.
Aside from the benefits of better collaboration, wider employee participation and information discovery, the expansion of social software applications inside organizations gives rise to yet another very powerful benefit:

The ability to see for the first time how information is flowing inside an organization and how human capital is being put to use. Think about that. Previous tools for sharing and collaborating have primarily consisted of email, work productivity desktop applications and portals – very structured and rigid in their set up and interaction, and never really providing a free form medium for users to leave their impressions and opinions behind in the way that the class of Enterprise 2.0 applications are providing. The earlier tools were often deployed with the methodology of ‘one size fits all’ and tended to guide all users in a specific predefined way. Consequently, the ability for an organization to really and effectively measure and impact their human capital has never existed.
Put it another way. How easy is it for your organization to answer these questions?

* Where are employees turning to for information used in their daily activities, and what is the quality of that information?
* In information searches, is the most relevant information surfacing to the top?
* Is duplicate information being created because already created information is hard to find, and how often is this happening?
* Are users spending time researching from scratch when there already is existing research and experts in house?

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